A demonstration Sunday on the eve of Earth Day condemned government inaction on environmental issues.
This is really obvious, but I don’t see anyone talking about it: Governing is impossible, because on the one hand, you have to make decisions to save the environment and maintain a viable ecosystem, while on the other, you have to stimulate the economy and create jobs. There will always be an unresolvable tension between them. This hit me while looking at the vast, vast amount of junk you can buy cheap from sites like Temu and Aliexpress, and how moving all that stuff around the planet, then throwing it away, is killing us all.
Update: Some thoughts on this in Le Devoir from William Shatner.
Chris 08:56 on 2024-04-22 Permalink
Kate, are you advocating that we live with no phone, no lights, no motor car, not a single luxury like Robinson Crusoe, as primitive as can be?! 🙂
Everyone wants trinkets, and those same people vote in the governments. Until the consequences are so bad that action will be too late, I doubt it will change. 🙁
Kate 09:17 on 2024-04-22 Permalink
It’s going to take a violent crisis to make us act on the environmental consequences of our lifestyle, and by then it will probably be too late. The massive forest fires haven’t persuaded us to change a thing.
My folks were old, and I heard about “the war” all the time. Did you know that people here endured some amount of food rationing, and put up blackout curtains for a time, for fear of Nazi invasion? Obviously the situation wasn’t like actually being under bombardment in Britain at the time, and some of it may have been performative or done to show solidarity, but it was done. When people need to act collectively in response to a threat, we can do it.
We’re even forgetting what it was like during that first year of Covid, when there wasn’t a vaccine yet and most of us tacitly agreed that we needed to shut some things down, avoid gathering in groups, change our behaviour in public. Yes, some idiots complained, but most of us complied, because the threat was present and imminent. We still don’t feel that yet about the environment, and even people with kids and grandchildren are still blithely going about consuming and travelling and eating as if there’s no tomorrow. And none of our leaders is strong enough to inspire change, because they’re afraid of damage to the economy.
steph 10:20 on 2024-04-22 Permalink
We don’t have to end consumerism completely. The government could pass laws against engineered obsolescence. The government could pass more laws against single use products and products made of such shoddy quality that end up being single use. As a consumer – do your part and actually stop buying that useless junk.
We managed to pass laws against pesticides and herbicides. Generally suburban lawns now look gross without these supplements. I think we’re doing fine as a society with ugly lawns.
Kate 11:24 on 2024-04-22 Permalink
And we really managed (via the Montreal protocol) to phase out the chemicals that were destroying the ozone layer. That’s a positive thing to have linked, however tenuously, to the city.
Ian 17:37 on 2024-04-23 Permalink
In my teenage years we were all convinced we would be obliterated in a minutes-long nuclear war and those few unlucky survivors would be suffering radiation exposure and nuclear winter. The end of civilization as we know it, to say the very least.
In comparison, walking back from climate catastrophe seems a lot more plausible.